Life's little surprises...ROCK!

So I have some really terrific news!!!! (At least, for my coworkers and myself.) I get to go to the ASHA convention in November!!!!! My district is even covering our gas and food, which was completely unexpected with the price of registration and a hotel room. I've literally been floating on cloud 9 since we found out yesterday.

In case you don't know what I'm rambling about, the American Speech & Hearing Association holds a national conference each year in a different state/city. It's attended by more than 12,000 SLPs, audiologists, and scientists in our field according to the website. The convention is a place to get CEUs (mine won't count until January which stinks), meet potential employers from across the nation, and get free stuff. My view of it at this point is a magical land where you get sprinkled with the SLP-fairy dust of knowledge. 

It's been a while since the convention has been held close to my state so none of my coworkers have ever attended one. They've all attended the state's convention though. I'm the only one who hasn't been to that so I'm completely clueless as to how these things work. November cannot get here soon enough. 


In other news, I have yet to start on the 4th and 5th grade language goal bank. Hearing screenings have just completely zapped my energy. Does anyone else have that problem? I never feel this wiped out after evaluations and those are much more mentally taxing. My audiometer is apparently tired of it too. It started blinking like crazy on me even after I gave it new batteries. No one could figure out what's wrong with it so the audiologist is going to send it off somewhere. I think it's just possessed. Thankfully, today was the last day of our mass screening and I told the teachers at my school that I will re-screen in 2-4 weeks. 

To celebrate the end of hearing screenings, here is a crafty tip to make Parts of Speech Cubes:

These are the store bought kind. Mine are blue.

Materials

1. Package of foam counting cubes from the Dollar Tree (I think Target also sold these)

1. Sharpie

Take two (or more if you want) blocks and the sharpie. Write a different part of speech on each side of the blocks. Make sure you give each side time to absorb the ink to avoid smearing. 

You can use these blocks to brainstorm different words for each category or to develop a sentence. 

The foam blocks are also great for making phonics cubes, visual phonics cubes (if you do that), question cubes...etc. I love easy crafts!